Peace in an Authoritarian International Order Versus Peace in the Liberal International Order
The end of the liberal peace and the victor’s peace
The liberal international order and related liberal/democratic peace theories have long been separated from their Kantian and internationalist underpinnings. At best, the victor’s peace of the post-war and post-cold war international order has underpinned the liberal international order and the subsequent liberal peace framework, leading to a pattern of stalemated peace impasses. The victor’s peace model has throughout history hinged upon top-down political reconstruction through diplomatic, political, economic, legal, and social means after a war had been won. In short, this meant that legitimacy would depend on victory being accepted by the vanquished and any subsequent reshaping of order would remain legitimate amongst subject elites and societies in the long term. The latter question of legitimacy for any victor’s peace order has always been its historical ‘Achilles heel’ both in terms of its top-down nature and its mismatch with conflict-affected societies, which ultimately distances peace from justice.
These problems have driven resurgent geopolitics at the structural level of international order as well undermining many regional and local peace processes around world. Peacemaking has gone into reverse in places where pronounced linkages have re-emerged between nationalist, sectarian, authoritarian, and geopolitical rationalities. These morbidities in international order have revived widely, as with Indian Prime Minister Modi’s recent retrenchment in Kashmir, the Syrian and Ukraine wars and the Russia’s President’s revisionist geopolitical philosophy. They are on display in the Middle East in the tensions and contradictions between different multipolar factions over the Gaza war. They are present to an extent not seen since the height of the Cold War or the 1930s. Underlying many recent developments are the failures of the liberal peace and US Foreign Policy after 9/11, and subsequent conduct in the Iraq War.
The victor’s peace reproduces the balance of power models of earlier eras. Its epistemologies and methodologies of peace follow a Realist ontology of enmity and power-relations. Local and regional forms of victor’s peace thus tend to be ordered according to the interests and capacity of regional and domestic military forces, the exercise of the means of violence by geopolitical and authoritarian actors, and by complex power-relations. Such dynamics tend to lead to the rejection of human rights, democracy, and pluralism in practice, essentially, as in Syria over the last decade. In this context, Russia has backed the authoritarian rule of President Assad according to President Putin’s geopolitical preferences and reading of prevailing domestic power relations.
The advent of the authoritarian international order
In effect, such dynamics have supported the expansion and validation of authoritarian interests and regional geopolitics, forming a wider international pattern. This dynamic can be described as a putative ‘Authoritarian International Order’ (AIO). As a consequence, widespread stalemated peace patterns have begun to break down in the now more multipolar environment, also calling into question the viability of the structure of the Liberal International Order (LIO) and the liberal peace (which were based on the broader post-Cold War victor’s peace that came into being briefly after 1990). Given the propensity towards cold war liberalism, neoliberalism, militarism, and their post-9/11 convergence on global counter-insurgency stabilisation strategies, the LIO and liberal peace models are also hard to defend (although their Kantian aspects are more viable as a critical enterprise). Their shift into neoliberalism and stabilisation thinking after the 1990s forms a bridge between the LIO and the emergence of the AIO. A key question is, does this indicate a rejection of critique or future potential for post-liberal innovation?
Rethinking critical approaches to peace during this contest
The theoretical framework of the LIO versus an AIO is merely a simple, illustrative schematic used to address the question of which is most significant for peace praxes’ alignment with scientific knowledge? It may represent a hard and exclusive conceptual and methodological binary in some senses. It also raises the issue of how to bridge the LIO and AIO, if indeed this is possible, with peacemaking tools, and whether these outcomes offer any emancipatory potential? Of course, the situation is complex, given that there are critical, transnational, transversal and emancipatory debates about politics continuing across global civil society and the global academy, as well as within states and institutions. Nevertheless, this framework helps to clarify some of the dynamics of the current and predominant pattern of competing and juxtaposed global hegemonic forces.
The multiplicity of ethnographic practice networks lauded in ‘local turn’, critical, feminist, and post-colonial thinking do not map onto multipolarity and the AIO, in terms of the former’s emancipatory claims. However, nor does multipolarity and the AIO map onto pluriversalism. Anticolonialism appears to be a common ground for the territorial autonomy and independence of state interests and government under multipolarity and the AIO, but not when rights are taken into account, or the biosphere, feminism, or justice, etc. In critical terms there is common ground on rights and justice at global-civil and social levels which is more closely connected to the LIO and liberal peace frameworks. These are, however, too easily captured by rational and state centric, or neo-imperial propaganda, even if ontologies of clashing interests versus non-violent/ non-extractive cooperation are fundamentally opposed on philosophical grounds. Multipolarity thus has a weak normative and ethical capacity as it posits limited cooperation and interaction between extremely different, state-centric, authoritarian systems, interests and spaces that are contested by all means possible. Post- and decolonial approaches to IR, along with critical and emergent thinking have much stronger, and common normative ontologies where shared coexistence is viable beyond and outside of traditionalist, geopolitical, state-centric, territorialist, and capitalist epistemological frameworks, even though the systems involved are also fundamentally different.
These ontological clashes over systems based upon reserved tools of violence versus cooperation cannot be bridged without a third set of theoretical and practical inputs, which even then will struggle as we have seen with the LIO. This requires significant institutional development (and rights plus institutional frameworks as they have been most developed in liberal theories) on a far greater scale than during the LIO. Any elision of these AIO and LIO frameworks of understanding for peace and order is at best superficial: their recent practices are governed by state-centric and neoliberal political systems, meaning they contain similar flaws, to a greater or lesser degree. Imperialism, authoritarianism and state centricity offered three attempts at governing order to create a limited peace that have failed historically, the LIO offered a further attempt which was more promising when viewed from the perspective of peace in its generation of discursive and practical space for further advances. The emerging AIO suffers from the same defects as those previous attempts, however: it is based upon an ontology of violence to a greater degree than the LIO, seeing it as a practical tool of domestic and foreign policy.
Ultimately the AIO appears to be based upon the premise of that violence is a political tool that can be used to achieve national and global interests in the context of regional blocs harking back to the 19th Century in part, for which counter-revolutionary strategies against the LIO can be implemented fairly quickly (and cheaply). The LIO is premised on cooperation, contact, and rights, and democracy, but has been slow to achieve them, and is habitually Eurocentric: it also maintains order against radical change to the post-1990 order to a large degree. Yet, it has frequently (though not always) been receptive to political claims from marginalised actors (at least in discursive terms). There seems to be more chance that it may provide a platform for future evolution in which violence is marginalised and stratifications are responded to by effective government than in the case of the AIO. Yet reforms and improvements have been too slow and thus a substantial challenge to its legitimacy has built up.
The LIO probably will not return though it has provided a platform for future, post-liberal development, which may be able to build short-term bridges with the AIO as well as its own internal critics, but the AIO will probably not survive in the longer term given its lack of peacemaking tools at the local and international levels, and its dependence on militarism, division, polarisation, and domination. This means alternatives to both the AIO and the LIO are required and more work is needed on post-liberal frameworks for peacemaking, in which local political claims are scaled up so that they drive the reconstruction of a post-liberal international order.
Conclusion: the anachronistic obsolescence of the AIO’s peacemaking capacity
The apparent impossibility- or limitations- of peacemaking by the AIO, or between the AIO and the LIO is a great concern (despite the claims that China, Russia, or the Gulf states have developed some capacity), as currently clear in the Ukraine and Middle East wars. Furthermore, global problems or local political claims are unlikely to be addressed substantially or consistently in critical terms under the AIO-LIO dynamic. This means that the recent progress made on local and everyday peacemaking, on rights, democracy, and justice, and their implications for state and international reform will be ignored, and ‘peace’ will be reduced to geopolitical balancing, connected with bloc interests rather than justice or human security.
This renders peacemaking and resultant political orders highly unstable, and socially illegitimate as they do not meet socio-political claims or meet the wider need for global innovation to address fundamental structural problems as war reinvents itself constantly. Thus, security, surveillance capitalism, and stabilisation will be the LIO and AIO’s only common ground, both international and domestically. This harks back an older story of peacemaking, and one that has failed constantly and often catastrophically, throughout history. We can do much better in critical terms if we are to set out a common and innovative, post-liberal agenda for peacemaking in and for the present and future.
Author information
Oliver P Richmond is:
- Professor, Department of Politics, University of Manchester
- International Research Professor, School of Law and Government, Dublin City University.
- Visiting Professor at Near East Institute, Near Eastern University, Lefkosha, Cyprus.
- Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ewha University, Seoul, South Korea.
- Honorary Professor, University of St Andrews, UK.
Comments on this article are most welcome. You can contact Oliver via oliver.richmond@manchester.ac.uk
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